Review of Pretty Poison

Promising concept -- "troubled" young man called on his Walter Mitty bluff by teen sociopath who has no qualms about committing to her true, vile, nature. Perkins is fragile, sympathetic, restless. He's Dean and Clift without the method contrivances, effortlessly haunted, still managing to project real need through his ambivalence. Tuesday Weld is too old for the part (supposedly 17, she looks her real age, and then some). We never believe her as an innocent; her gauzy insincerity is supposed to be charming, but it grates against the profound pain of Perkins' "Dennis Pitt", and you see how doomed he is from the moment he first sees Weld's "Sue Ann", leading her charges as a small-town drum majorette. Pitt's wiles are the disarmed wiles of the innocent; Sue Ann probably (tough to tell, really, given Weld's flat performance, and the hesitant, amateurish, direction and framing) sniffs out Pitt's ingenuous fraudulence from the beginning, and subsequently uses him accordingly. The two murders that follow are almost incidental, but what stuns and endures is how Perkins' confession resounds with a fascinating implication: is Pitt merely a martyr to his own mock-heroic madness, or is there an extraordinary patience, and calculation, to his elaborate ruse?